Redefining Human Rights in the Struggle for Peace and Development by Terrence E. Paupp (review)

The so-called “third-generation” rights to peace and development have not always received a warm reception in the liberal west, having been met with confusion, indifference, and sometimes even outright hostility and derision.¹ The right to development in particular had a difficult birth, coming at a time when the ideology of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus were rapidly gaining momentum, making a gospel out of deregulation, privatization, elimination of subsidies, free trade, and laissez-faire capitalism more generally. In 1986, the United States famously cast the solitary lone vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development (with many European donor states choosing to abstain).² In the nearly 30 years that have followed, the United States and many of its allies have continued to foreground the importance of liberté in matters of international human rights law, while the questions of egalité and fraternité so central to the realization of the right to development have been largely pushed to the margins.

Yet in the global South, the legal significance and moral necessity of the right to development are all but taken for granted. To many, the gap between the global North and South in this and other matters only reinforces the notion that international law and its associated institutional machinery were made for and by the liberal West, and do little to serve the interests of the non-Western “other,” perhaps even by design. The right to development then joins a chorus of other international legal principles—sovereign equality, self-determination, economic cooperation—that have been underemphasized and marginalized by the dominant (read Western) currents in international law.

For Terrence Paupp, closing the gulf that separates these worldviews—and bringing questions of egalité and fraternité into the foreground—is of immense consequence to the future of human rights. The lack of importance often accorded to the right to development (and to peace and the environment, which receive a less detailed treatment in the book) forces us to ask hard questions about the relevance of the mainstream human rights regime to the problems and suffering of a twenty-first century humanity facing threats—crushing poverty, rising inequality, pervasive structural violence, ecological collapse—that elude protections of earlier generations of human rights, rooted as they were in the paradigms of a state-based and mercantilist world that has long been eclipsed by the forces of globalization.

In this struggle, Paupp rejects facile distinctions between law and politics, and largely eschews historic debates about the vagueness, legal status, justiciability, or enforceability of the right to development. In Paupp’s view, human rights law, as much as international trade law, is a terrain for moral, legal, political, and ideological struggle. And whatever its legal status—the right to development is regarded by many as no more than “soft law”³—this has little do to with its transcivilizational legitimacy, or whether it is actually a useful construct for achieving important humanitarian objectives. There are therefore obvious tensions between the law’s redemptive and emancipatory possibilities and the fact that it is also the product of and expression of dominant power relations, something Paupp explores in a distinction he makes between the “power of law” and the “law of power.”⁴ While these tensions can never be fully reconciled, Paupp argues that to be realized, rights to peace and development must be enshrined as global constitutional directive principles, rooted as much in a new global ethics as in law or politics.⁵

Paupp presents the ongoing struggle for the realization of the rights to peace and development as a sort of Manichean battle pitting a hegemonic and monolithic West—with the United States, Word Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Wall Street, and US Treasury as its collective spearhead—against the Rest. Realizing the rights to peace and development would appear to require nothing short of revolution, or at least a fundamental...